eReady ICT Readiness Assessment Tool
The Challenge
The implementation of ICTs in South African schools is a difficult task, due to the extreme divergences of schools with regard to infrastructure, especially in the rural areas, ranging from poor building infrastructure, no electricity to no connectivity. Moreover, educators and learners lack the ability to effectively create content of their own and to communicate, collaborate and integrate ICTs into teaching and learning. These inequalities often translate into unequal educational opportunities amongst learners from different socio-economic backgrounds.
The Approach
The development process of the eReady tool to assess the ICT maturity levels of public schools in South Africa, involved several steps starting with baseline studies at selected schools and iterative adaptions of paper-based tools desktop studies of other ICT Maturity Assessment models. The eReady tool was then digitised and piloted in schools. An initial baseline study was conducted with 15 public schools in KZN. The schools were selected based on their quintile ranking on the Quantile Register. This was to ensure that all quintile levels were represented for the ICT Maturity Assessment tool to be developed inclusively and comprehensively.
Key Learnings
The findings revealed that although schools are aware of the need for ICT usage and integration into the curriculum, they yet had to reach a stage where ICTs were entrenched in the leadership and vision of the schools. Both the organisational and infrastructure enablers to foster an enabling environment for ensuring the ICT readiness of a school, were lacking in most of the provinces.
A marginal increase was evident in the overall connectivity maturity of schools in specific provinces, which indicated that access is more readily available to educators and administrators. Access for learners, however, were still lacking in most instances of those schools who participated in the pilot.
In terms of leadership and management, the results emphasise that more should be done to encourage educators to integrate the use of ICT in the curriculum. Dedicated and adequately trained ICT educators should be identified and supported to strengthen the ICT readiness of a specific school, and as such, embed digital technology in the education sector of South Africa.
Contact
For more information, or to partner with us on the eReady project: